The Playboy Photographer Who Was A Playboy

When I met him, I knew that he had been a Playboy photographer, well-known and well-versed with the women around him. For years our friendship never went further than that of casual, and then one day it did, as quick as it was, I had no reason other than to find it all sincere.

Months later, I was pregnant, and a new reality hit not just myself but him too, we were going to become parents. Our relationship moving forward was never conventional. It was probably as unconventional as any parents could find themselves as we lived in the same building but on different floors. Having been frequently asked about our unconventional ways, I  always still expressed that we had a traditional relationship, because, to me, that's what it was. 

The age difference between him and I never seemed to be an issue with me; in fact, it is probably something that initially drew me to him, priding myself as having an "old soul." In time, our daughter grew in age, and seasons came and went. His career went in a direction where mine remained stagnant, and I realized that the age difference I once thought bound us, now was becoming an unwound thread. 

Logic sometimes isn't as evident to one as it is to another, and I realized that I felt myself on a merry-go-round that wouldn't stop to let me off. I was becoming to feel trapped, and my gut was becoming increasingly unnerved. I noticed relationships were ending during the pandemic. I wondered or plotted how my own could also become on the list of others that had not made it.

Why was it so easy for them to come to grips with a failing relationship? Was it just having to spend so much time with another that they realized they wanted to be on their own? 

Though we lived separately, the pandemic did find us sharing a roof over several months while his son visited from New York. During this time, my gut was beginning to become harder to ignore until I didn't anymore. It was during a morning where I knew he would be away with our daughter and noticed his briefcase full of his precious hard rives remained open.

Open and available, available for me to view. I have only looked for information a couple of other times in my life, listened to my gut as my therapist calls it, where I did uncover truths of my adoption and birth parents, cheating boyfriends. So I wondered what I would discover now. 

It took only a short amount of time to uncover the not so obscure names of folders containing photographs and videos that were explicit and indeed not of professional photography standards. The explicit data that I uncovered covered the span of not just my relationship with him, but my friendship with him when I knew him to be with other women. Messages expressing his love and adoration

I uncovered that simultaneously were written as similar had been expressed to me. These late-night photoshoots and explicit video sessions had been taking place only a few floors down from where my daughter and I innocently slept. There was no coming back from this, from what I uncovered, what I knew to be true about my relationship now.

There was no coming back from this!